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Il predictive policing italiano - XLAW
by Antonio Vetro' July 31, 2019

July 31, 2019

Condivido un'interessante segnalazione del collega Antonio Servetti (con suo permesso) nell’ambito del c.d. "predictive policing": https://it.businessinsider.com/perla-il-dirigente-di-polizia-ha-creato-un-a… "Un algoritmo che è in grado di prevedere i reati predatori come rapine, furti, truffe, scippi e molto altro, ore prima che avvengano.” “Sovrapponiamo i dati criminali a questa città virtuale, ci accorgiamo che i reati avvengono in quelle riserve di caccia e combaciano proprio con le fasi a operazioni regolari all’interno della città.” Il sistema si chiama XLAW, e viene dato in comodato d’uso gratuito alle questure, secondo quanto riportato nell’articolo. Riporto la metafora usata per descrivere l'approccio: Territorio = Paziente Crimine Predatorio = Malattia Ogni altro dato acquisito = Sintomo/criterio Colleghi architetti mi riferiscono che l’analogia è usata da almeno 200 anni… XLaw ovviamente è in uso da meno tempo, secondo l’articolo è sperimentato dal 2004 a Napoli e dal 2011 funziona su tutta la città. Io ne vengo a conoscenza solo ora (sigh!) grazie alla segnalazione di Antonio, e le ricerche su Google datano notizie da circa un anno. Al di là dell’essere concordi o meno con questo tipo di approccio, sarebbe interessante poterci mettere le mani per verificare l’effetto dei cicli di feedback ed eventuali discriminazioni dettate da un approccio su serie storiche, come trovato in uno studio del 2016 fatto su un software simile, PredPol: https://rss.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00960… Ringrazio in anticipo per suggerimenti utili a seguire questa pista. Un caro saluto, antonio vetrò

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In Hong Kong Protests, Faces Become Weapons - The New York Times
by Alberto Cammozzo July 30, 2019

July 30, 2019

<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/26/technology/hong-kong-protests-facial-rec…> HONG KONG — The police officers wrestled with Colin Cheung in an unmarked car. They needed his face. They grabbed his jaw to force his head in front of his iPhone. They slapped his face. They shouted, “Wake up!” They pried open his eyes. It all failed: Mr. Cheung had disabled his phone’s facial-recognition login with a quick button mash as soon as they grabbed him. As Hong Kong convulses amid weeks of protests, demonstrators and the police have turned identity into a weapon. The authorities are tracking protest leaders online and seeking their phones. Many protesters now cover their faces, and they fear that the police are using cameras and possibly other tools to single out targets for arrest. And when the police stopped wearing identification badges as the violence escalated, some protesters began to expose officers’ identities online. One fast-growing channel on the social messaging app Telegram seeks and publishes personal information about officers and their families. The channel, “Dadfindboy,” has more than 50,000 subscribers and advocates violence in crude and cartoonish ways. Rival pro-government channels seek to unmask protesters in a similar fashion. Mr. Cheung, who was arrested last week on a suspicion of “conspiring and abetting murder,” subscribes to the “Dadfindboy” channel, although he denied being among its founders as the police have said and he condemned posts calling for violence. He believes he was targeted by the police because he developed a tool that could compare images against a set of photos of officers to find matches — a project he later abandoned. Interested in All Things Tech? The Bits newsletter will keep you updated on the latest from Silicon Valley and the technology industry. “I don’t want them to be like secret police,” said Mr. Cheung, who was released on bail and has not been charged with wrongdoing. “If law enforcement officers don’t wear anything to show their identity, they’ll become corrupt. They’ll be able to do whatever they want.” “With the tool, ordinary citizens can tell who the police are,” he added. Hong Kong is at the bleeding edge of a significant change in the authorities’ ability to track dangerous criminals and legitimate political protesters alike — and in their targets’ ability to fight back. Across the border in China, the police often catch people with digital fingerprints gleaned using one of the world’s most invasive surveillance systems. The advent of facial-recognition technology and the rapid expansion of a vast network of cameras and other tracking tools has begun to increase those capabilities substantially. The transformation strikes a strong chord in Hong Kong. The protests began over a proposed bill that would have allowed the city to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China, where the police and courts ultimately answer to the Communist Party. [...]

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Conservatives Allege Big Tech Is Biased Against Them - The Atlantic
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 30, 2019

July 30, 2019

Why Conservatives Allege Big Tech Is Muzzling Them Google and Facebook aren’t infringing on the right’s freedom of expression, but insisting otherwise is politically convenient. JUL 28, 2019 Siva Vaidhyanathan https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/conservatives-pretend-big… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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How the West Got China's Social Credit System Wrong | WIRED
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019

https://www.wired.com/story/china-social-credit-score-system/ (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Privacy group asks court to reconsider FTC’s $5 billion Facebook deal | Ars Technica
by J.C. DE MARTIN July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/07/privacy-group-asks-court-to-rec… (Sent from my wireless device; please excuse brevity and typos (if any))

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Mattarella, web rispetti i principi delle democrazie
by don Luca Peyron July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019

Le sagge parole del nostro presidente della Repubblica dl http://www.ansa.it/sito/notizie/tecnologia/tlc/2019/07/25/mattarella-web-ri… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Sentenza del rinvio nel caso C‑40/17, Fashion ID GmbH & Co. KG v Verbraucherzentrale NRW e.V.
by Alberto Cammozzo July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019

Se metti il plugin di FB sei co-responsabile per il trattamento dei dati che elabora. <http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?text=&docid=216555> [...] 84 Par conséquent, il apparaît que Fashion ID peut être considérée comme étant responsable, au sens de l’article 2, sous d), de la directive 95/46, conjointement avec Facebook Ireland, des opérations de collecte et de communication par transmission des données à caractère personnel des visiteurs de son site Internet.[...] Accolta la posizione dell'avvocato generale Bobek <http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document.jsf?docid=209357&doclang=EN> [...] A person that has embedded a third-party plug-in in its website, which causes the collection and transmission of the user’s personal data (that third party having provided the plug-in), shall be considered to be a controller within the meaning of Article 2(d) of Directive 95/46. However, that controller’s (joint) responsibility is limited to those operations for which it effectively co-decides on the means and purposes of the processing of the personal data. [...]

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Trenitalia fa causa a un'app che mostra i ritardi
by don Luca Peyron July 29, 2019

July 29, 2019

Questione di puntualità, di interesse pubblico, di dati open o meno... comunque un caso interessante. dl https://www.wired.it/lifestyle/mobilita/2019/07/29/trenitalia-trenit-dati-t… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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La tecnologia nel sistema di controllo politico e sociale saudita
by don Luca Peyron July 28, 2019

July 28, 2019

Da anni Riyad tiene un database che riguarda le sue cittadine con lo scopo di proteggere uno dei suoi istituti sociali più oscurantisti, quello del “guardiano”, che vede sulla base di una zelante interpretazione degli hadith <http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/hadith> ogni donna costretta ad affidare la sua intera esistenza al familiare maschio a lei più vicino (il marito, il padre, a volte persino il figlio più grande). Questo costume sociale, sostenuto dal governo saudita, di fatto impedisce a ogni donna saudita di avere il controllo sulla propria vita, dovendo dare conto al “guardiano” persino degli spostamenti più banali. Buona lettura, con un po' di mal di pancia assicurato. dl http://www.treccani.it/magazine/atlante/geopolitica/La_tecnologia_nel_siste… _________________________ www.universitari.to.it via XX settembre 83, Torino tel. 011 5156239

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Don't ban facial recognition | TheHill
by Alberto Cammozzo July 28, 2019

July 28, 2019

Amitai Etzioni si schiera a favore del riconoscimento facciale: "se avessimo avuto le attuali tecnologie di riconoscimento facciale, avremmo potuto arrestare i terroristi della Boston marathon". Ammesso e non concesso, una delle molte domande da porsi sarebbe piuttosto: "se le attuali tecnologie di riconoscimento facciale fossero state implementate da allora, dato il tasso di falsi positivi, quanti arresti e uccisioni di cittadini erroneamente sospettati di essere terroristi avrebbero comportato?" E la garanzia di impiego rispettoso della legge è difficile da ottenere. <https://thehill.com/opinion/civil-rights/454584-dont-ban-facial-recognition> At approximately 2:50 p.m. on April 15, 2013, two bombs exploded close to the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and wounding another 250. The authorities were able to gain images of the terrorists, but were frantically seeking to establish their identities, to catch them before they planted more bombs, which turned out not to be an idle fear. Unable to identify the terrorists over three days, the FBI released their photographs, asking the public to help. Using current versions of facial recognition (FR), law enforcement could have identified them within three minutes. This astonishing number is not a rhetorical flourish; it is based on a six-month study by a Canadian robbery-investigation unit. In New York City, FR has been used in a variety of ways, including the arrests of a suspected rapist, a person who pushed another onto the subway tracks, the identification of a hospitalized woman suffering from Alzheimer’s and the identification of a child sex trafficker sought by the FBI. Over the course of 2018, New York City detectives requested 7,024 FR searches, resulting in 1,851 possible matches and 998 arrests. ADVERTISEMENT Like other new surveillance technologies, FR encounters a storm of concerns. Some critics sound alarms, based largely on what they fear FR will lead to not on observations of what it does. Thus Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, warns that “[t]he ultimate nightmare is that we lose all anonymity when we step outside our homes. If you know where everyone is, you know where they work, live, pray. You know the doctors they visit, political meetings they attend, their hobbies, the sexual activities they engage in and who they’re associating with.” Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) likened FR to George Orwell’s Big Brother from “1984.” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) believes that “[w]e have a technology that was created and designed by one demographic, that is mostly effective on one demographic, and they’re trying to sell it and impose it on the entirety of the country.” In response, some localities, namely San Francisco, California, and Somerville, Massachusetts, have already banned the use of FR by their local government agencies. In the nation’s capital, legislators on both sides of the aisle are calling on Congress to ban FR or at least introduce a moratorium on its use. Representative Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) advocates “a timeout.” Representative Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the chairman of the House Oversight and Reform Committee, is weighing both options. [...]

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